Since I upgraded my desktop computer, I've got the old motherboard and CPU just laying around. I'm currently running a minecraft server on my laptop with Ubuntu Desktop as the OS.

The server is used by my sister and her friends. They got plans for it and want people to be able to join, but I'm not sure if the laptop is powerful enough as it's got a lowend intel dual core and 4 GB memory.

Will the A10-5800K suffice as a minecraft server? Would need to purchase memory and a CPU cooler as I threw away the stock cooler when I bought an aftermarket one.

For a LAN this would suffice but as the map grows and more people play, network bandwidth could become a concern. Also, residential connections don't provide as good of ping times compared datacenter-based servers. So the only real concern I would have would be bandwidth and latency.

With a handful of people you should be fine. If you want to go the extra mile, put the server files on a RAM disk that is occasionally synced to hard disk for optimal performance.Edited by tehmaggot - 1/9/14 at 9:44am

I've not played Minecraft much in the past year or so, but MineOS was always my favorite choice for OS. It's a lightweight *nix distro, and it has a nifty Web UI used to create/delete/manage worlds, plugins, and backups. Pretty cool.

As far as network security, make sure the server is behind a firewall and you change the port that the Minecraft server runs on. This is mainly what you can do to help protect things, but it will only go so far. DDoS attacks are basically unpreventable, if something like that was to happen (to a small minecraft world, it's highly unlikely). Also, the WebUI for your MineOS server should NOT be accessible outside of your LAN. If it is, and someone figures out (or bruteforces) the password, they can delete your worlds or whatever else.